540 – Character Banter

The Mythcreant Podcast

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10d ago

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Just a couple of buddies giving each other a hard time, what fun! Unless one of them says something that goes too far, and now they look like a jerk to the audience. This is a balancing act writers must tackle: showing characters’ personality and friendship without stepping over a line. This is difficult in fiction and real life, but at least the former lets us plan ahead.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]

Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: It’s time to show off our deep and enduring friendship, you guys. I’m gonna be clever. I’m gonna be witty. You two suck and you smell bad, eh?

Chris: Oh, ha ha.

Oren: Snarky remark. Self-deprecating joke. Pop culture reference!

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: I think I got this solved everybody. We figured it out.

Bunny: Can’t you tell what good friends we are? We’re the kind of friends who would never forget to write notes for this episode.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: We would not do that.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Just as we would not stink and suck.

Chris: Look, I’m feeling very attacked right now.

Bunny: [Laughs]

Oren: Look, this isn’t an attack on you, Chris. This is an attack on anyone who happened to not make show notes for our episode on character banter. I don’t know who that is. I’m being very neutral here. I’m just lobbing attacks at everyone. We’ll see who it lands on.

Chris: Have you considered that actually the blank space where my notes should be is an artistic statement that is symbolic?

Oren: Mmm. It could be that. That’s good.

Chris: See, it’s deeply ironic because it’s about banter, and yet it is silent.

Oren: Uh oh. We’re getting into artsy banter now. This has become very literary banter. I don’t love it. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Avant-garde podcast. They’ll teach this in podcast class someday.

Chris: [Laughs] They’ll make poor, poor students try to decipher its meaning, but the only right meaning will be what the teacher thinks.

Oren: It’ll be great. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: The true American classic.

Bunny: They’ll be hunting through the archives for the fabled notes with the white space in them. It’s like the lost folio. Moving back to banter, from other episodes we’ve done on literary complaints.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: The storytellers like banter. We write banter because it’s fun. It’s a good way to show character dynamics and what characters mean to each other and how close they are. It can build chemistry. Flirting, I would say, is a type of banter and it’s fun and humorous. It lifts up the dialogue and makes it amusing. I would say those are the main points of banter.

Oren: Hilariously, because of the backlash against the MCU, a lot of people are weirdly anti-banter right now. They don’t like it. They seem to think it’s bad for characters to have quippy dialogue, which is very funny to me, I occasionally encounter that in writing discussions. But then of course the moment something that’s not the MCU comes out, that’s quippy, everyone loves it.

Chris: So is it just they’re tired of the MCU or is it they’re tired of the specific types of quips the MCU uses? Which I think, Oren, you probably summed it up pretty well. Self-deprecating joke, pop culture reference.

Bunny: Ugh.

Oren: The pop culture reference maybe, but even then, I’m honestly not convinced. For example, the D&D movie, it objectively speaking, had very similar dialogue to an MCU movie. Not exactly the same, because again, they don’t make modern pop culture references. But it’s pretty similar, and no one saw it, but everyone who did see it loved it. So I don’t know. I’m very skeptical that people are actually sick of quippy dialogue.

Chris: They’re just sick of the MCU.

Oren: I think they are sick of the MCU and the moment you take away the MCU, it’s like, actually, people liked this. And then, there are of course accusations people throw around like, “This has MCU writing.” But, when I look at it, they just mean something they didn’t like. That’s all it means. I don’t think it has any real definition that is useful for writers.

Chris: Personally, we’ve seen so many first person narrators in fantasy, in particular romantasy right now. Which again, it’s nothing wrong with romantasy, it’s just that romanasy is very hot. Really big trend. Anytime, it’s just like the MCU, you have a lot of something, it starts to get old.

So we have all of these first person narrators that are using real world curse words and tend to have a style of humor that is, and I think this is actually another complaint with the MCU and it’s witticisms, it feels like it’s not taking the story seriously. That we can’t be serious about anything anymore. And this again, with jokes in general, if you aim the joke in the wrong direction, it becomes a big problem. I think there was in Rise of Skywalker, people were making jokes at Hux’s expense in the beginning.

Oren: That was Last Jedi.

Chris: That was Last Jedi.

Oren: It was when Poe flies his X-Wing to do a little “Who’s on First” routine with Hux to buy the rebellion time to escape. And it was very silly.

Chris: If you need your villain to be threatening, that’s a very bad idea to make a joke at the villain’s expense that way. Some villains are so scary you can actually get away with it. But in general, it’s like a lesser extent of that. Where after story, after story, after story where we have that same tone. Nothing is taken seriously because it’s like we’re D&D players who are too busy goofing around. [Chuckles] Everybody kind of craves something that’s a little more buttoned down. A little bit more ready to take itself seriously and be a little bit more emotionally potent. Because it dims all the other emotions.

Bunny: And here’s the thing, quips and banter are great in a dark setting. You need a break from that darkness. And, especially if you have a group of friends or something, the crew. I just read Mistborn and I enjoyed the banter of the crew very much. I thought that was quite well done, and because that is such a dark setting, it was often a welcome relief from the rest of that darkness.

But when it’s all quips and a little bit of darkness sprinkled in, that they also quip about, that’s tiresome. It feels like the serious parts don’t get the weight that they deserve. Or in the MCU, it feels like it doesn’t trust the serious parts to carry themselves. You’ll lose the audience’s attention if you don’t make a little jab about the thing you’re trying to get them to take seriously. That’s a complaint I’ve heard for sure.

Chris: It goes to show that you do want some tonal variety. Within reason. It’s like you have a color palette. If you were doing a painting, for your tone, where you have a certain level of range. And not that you can’t have comedic stories that can be funny most of the way through, but I do think that having some level of tone variation where you allow moments to be a little bit more serious, can get audiences ready for them to be silly again, in some cases.

Oren: I think it’s really hard to tell to what extent when, people say that about an MCU movie where they’re like, “It took itself too not seriously.” Like every moment was undercut. It’s hard to separate that from the general backlash against the MCU. I would say that Thor: Love and Thunder, for example, is a movie that definitely undercut where it should not have, by making too many jokes, like when Natalie Portman is dying of stage four cancer. They are still making the same kind of, of quippy dialogue. And that’s not even a situation where jokes are inappropriate. People make dark jokes in those situations all the time, but the specific kind of quippy MCU joke felt really out of place in that scene.

But I’ve also seen people making those complaints about every MCU movie that comes out, and I’m not really convinced that’s actually the problem. I think that’s just become a popular complaint ‘cause it sounds sophisticated. It sounds like you know what you’re talking about when you say that.

Chris: And with a dark comedy that has genuinely dark elements in it, sometimes you do want to lighten those dark elements up a bit and it kind of broadens the audience by allowing people to tolerate dark elements that they would otherwise have trouble with, by making jokes and lightening the mood. And that’s a good thing.

That’s kind of one of the tricky things about storytelling, is every time we give advice, there’s always tons of little niche situations, in which things are different. Yes, don’t make a joke at the expense of your villain, but Cabin in the Woods does it, for instance. But this is a movie, where it’s a lot easier to create a big sense of immediate threat and jump scares and all of those things. And these are really, genuinely very scary monster villains, zombies. So it doesn’t have to worry about the movie not being scary anymore because we made a funny joke.

Oren: It’s been interesting that I haven’t heard the same complaint about Thunderbolts, which I haven’t seen. So I don’t know. I’m curious what’s going on there.

Bunny: I do think the MCU is more prone to undercutting its dramatic moments than other properties I’ve seen. And I think it gets less leeway because it does it so often, but I think it is endemic to the MCU in a lot of ways because it is known for that type of humor. And as you’ve said, when those movies started to come out, that was not a super common style of humor, and we were coming out of really grim, dark, Batman movies were the most recent superhero movie. So it felt fresh.

Oren: Whereas now the most recent Batman movie that was even darker and grittier, somehow, felt like a refreshing change. It was like, “Oh, Batman takes himself very seriously in this movie. Okay. All right. I don’t hate it.”

Bunny: Yes. It’s the Batman-Thor spectrum. It’s a sine wave. We oscillate between them.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: I’ve been working on some banter in my current work in progress, as it were, and I’ve discovered that I only know how to write banter based on Kirk and Spock.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: I was like, “Okay, how am I gonna make these characters sound?” ‘Cause that’s one of the things with banter, is you want the characters to sound distinct. You don’t want them to sound like they’re repeating the same lines back and forth at each other. So I was like, “All right, I’ll make one of them warm and outgoing and friendly. And I’ll make the other one kind of stoic and reserved and more dry.” And I was like, “I’ve created Kirk and Spock.” I didn’t mean to do that, but I did. [Chuckles]

Bunny: The latter one of those is also just your default character model, so…

Oren: Yeahhh.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: But I also think that in general comedy, that’s how a lot of jokes work. The quote unquote “straight” man, which is a weird thing to say now. And seems to have a very different meaning.

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Bunny: It’s always just a straight guy and then Spock. It’s just a heterosexual man, and then Spock.

Chris: [Laughs] But really, I think a lot of jokes are funnier if there’s somebody who is not laughing. And there is some contrast between the characters. So it kind of feels like that’s Spock, and then that character ends up being serious, which is Vulcan-like.

Oren: Well, if I was gonna get into this, I would say that the straight man-type archetype is certainly useful and shows up in a lot of comedies. I wouldn’t put Spock in that. And the reason why, is that Spock, even though he has the reputation of having no emotions, he loves himself a very underhanded jibe. He does that all the time. It’s like one of his favorite things. So he is definitely part of the banter. And sometimes the big three in Star Trek will kind of take turns playing the straight for the other two to joke off of. So I don’t know if we can say it’s specifically one of them or the other.

Bunny: I think, to touch on something that you touched on in the article that we have about this, which go check it out. It’s called like, “Banter and Barbs Without Being Mean.” Is that if there is one character who’s not laughing or not seeming to participate in it, that is a situation where it can start to feel mean. The other characters are kind of ragging on them. And obviously it’s not just not laughing. Like, exasperated sigh and rolling your eyes is also a way to engage with it in a way that makes it seem not mean. It’s all in how you do it, but it is something to be aware of when it feels like it only flows one way.

Chris: Generally, if you have a couple of people… and again, the reason why it’s so good at building friendships is because, when somebody delivers a barb or teases somebody else, that is actually a risky social behavior. And so if people can do it to each other successfully, that shows their closeness and their trust. So it’s almost in a way testing the relationship. And that’s why it’s interpreted as, “Oh, these people are good friends.”

But if you only have it happen in one direction, when one person is delivering a lot of teasing, a lot of little barbs and needling and the other person is not doing it back, and sometimes is not allowed to do it back. That definitely looks like a toxic relationship. If, for instance, one person likes to needle the other, but then gets upset if somebody needles ’em back. For instance.

Oren: Oh my gosh. The person who loves to give other people crap but will flip their lid if they ever get any crap in return. Probably not actually the worst person on earth, but definitely feels that way when you’re interacting with them.

Bunny: Don’t give it if you can’t take it. The give and take is what a relationship is.

Oren: Personally, I think that when you have characters give each other a hard time, you should then narrate the characters worrying for hours afterwards. Like, “Was that funny or was I just being mean?”

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Chris: Relatable.

Bunny: No, no. You have to have them come up with a really good joke hours later.

Oren: They also can debate whether, “Should I apologize or is that gonna make it weird?” I think this needs to be an avenue of character exploration that fiction has ignored for far too long.

Chris: No, see, for me it’s somebody saying something jokey at me and me being like, “Oh no. That means I’m supposed to joke back. How do joke?”

Oren: How? How can joke?

Chris: How. Oh no. [Laughs]

Bunny: It’s a good question. A lot of us wonder, “How do joke?”

Chris: I actually have a post on that too. [Laughs] I’m much better at writing them than I am at saying them.

Bunny: That’s true. You did write an ongoing comic.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: My favorite kind of joke is when you have a character who is really well known for making funny self-deprecating jokes, and then you make every character do that.

Chris: Ohh, everyone is Sokka.

Oren: Everyone is Sokka now.

Chris: Also known as Dragon Prince.

Oren: It’s very funny to me that it, that Avatar had the correct amount of Sokka and that correct amount was one.

Chris: One Sokka.

Oren: And then they made Korra that didn’t have any. And it wasn’t as good. And then they made Dragon Prince where they had lots and it was bad. It’s like, no, the correct number is one. You need to get the the correct Sokka balance for this show to work properly.

Chris: Actually, Dragon Prince was a good example of banter that did not work. Actually it was more the self-deprecating jokes. That’s what I noticed and that’s why I called everybody Sokka when I was watching it, because you would have things like, again, villains. Which, generally, you want your villains to be threatening, as we already talked about.

And the Sokka character known for making self-deprecating jokes, which caused him to be taken a lot less seriously. And so having a villain do that is… Why is the villain making themself less threatening just to add a little humor? And it kept doing that and it made the characters feel very inconsistent.

Oren: And here’s the thing, I can imagine a villain who is so confident and scary that they make self-deprecating jokes and it doesn’t matter because they’re so blatantly powerful. Or even not even necessarily a villain. I can imagine a hero who does that.

Chris: Or they’re using it in what’s obviously a calculated social strategy. They’re manipulative. You see them manipulate another character and then make a self-deprecating joke to seem approachable. There’s a number of ways you could do it, sure.

Bunny: Or they’re doing it ironically. The joke can be that they’re self-deprecating, but they’re self-deprecating in a humble-brag kind of way.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: But in Dragon Prince, they were definitely not doing that. Instead, what they were doing was either making weird mistakes that they would not naturally make and then trying to make a joke out of it. Or deliberately calling attention to their actual failings and weaknesses, which you typically don’t want characters to do when they’re supposed to seem cool.

Probably the crystallized example of it is in one of the early episodes where the elf-assassin lady doesn’t know what a whetstone is. And she’s not making a joke. The show is making a joke about her not knowing what a whetstone is.

Chris: Because she’s asking for the “thingy.”

Oren: The “sword-stone thingy.”

Chris: To make her look silly, but she’s trained as an assassin her entire life. How does she not know it’s called a whetstone?

Bunny: That’s literally a joke out of Date Night.

Oren: My new headcanon is that the reason why, is that she’s an aristocrat. And so she’s been training as an assassin, but she’s had servants doing all the logistics work. So she’s really good at fighting, but she doesn’t know how to put on the armor, or fix a broken bow. She doesn’t know how to string a bow. Someone always does that part for her. [Chuckles]

Chris: This might be a good segue into Kaiju Preservation Society. Bunny, I know you wanted to…

Oren: Bunny’s got beef.

Bunny: [Chuckles] I do have beef. I found the banter in that extremely tiresome. And in the course of writing notes, which I did, I came up with a hypothesis, which is that banter as we talked about is all about relationship building. It’s often showing that characters are familiar with each other and the depth of their relationship, and what do they tease each other about? What can that tell you about them? The banter in Kaiju Preservation Society is directed almost entirely at exposition. They’re bantering with each other in that they’re talking to each other, but they’re really bantering with the exposition.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: And that is compounded by the fact–

Chris: That is funny.

Bunny: –that they all sound the same!

Chris: They do sound the same.

Bunny: They’re all redditors! That’s it. They’re just redditers.

Oren: They’ve bantered so much that they have become one.

Bunny: They have.

Oren: Like how is that not a beautiful relationship?

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: They have mind-melded in the samey-ness of their banter. It feels like I’m doing a bit of the thing we talked about with the MCU earlier. Where pieces of this in other media are good. Looking at the conversations themselves in a vacuum, this could be good banter and it does make the exposition a bit more entertaining when someone is explaining something and the others are, I guess, quipping about it. You can do that. But when that is the entirety of the book, and this happens in every expositional scene, even serious ones, then I am frustrated. I am done with it. I want to leave Reddit.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Scalzi has always had an issue that he tends to over-rely on dialogue, and his dialogue is not the most distinctive. And, no shade from me, mine isn’t either. So I try not to rely on it as much. You can see this in all of his books, but you definitely notice it less in his more plot-heavy books because there’s more plot, so there’s less time where the characters have to spend kind of chatting. And despite this, I actually really liked Kaiju Preservation Society, but I totally got what you’re saying because there is so much banter and so much of it is the same. It’s so similar.

Bunny: I think a huge part of it for me is the fact that the characters don’t sound any different because they are not that different. I couldn’t tell you how the personality of Jamie is different from the personality of Niamh, who’s name I hope I’m pronouncing right, except that they know different things.

Oren: I don’t think I could tell you the name of a single character in that book other than Jamie.

Bunny: And so when they’re bantering, it doesn’t feel like it’s a conversation between people. It sounds like a conversation that’s designed to be jokey conversation. And because there’s no difference between the characters’ personalities or the way they speak, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything about the characters through how they banter.

And so that is part one of the problem and part two is the fact that they’re really truly bantering with the exposition and not each other. Now I read Mistborn, as I mentioned, and they had a lot of banter scenes too. The purpose of those is to set up the fact that this is a close-knit crew and they’re quite trusting and it’s meant to be a contrast from Vin’s previous crew, which was just awful, and terribly abusive.

And so it’s Vin observing a group of people who are comfortable with each other and genuinely friends and they rib each other over things. And that is, I think, critical. They are ribbing each other over specific traits that they each have. Ham is different than Breeze, and Breeze is different than Kel. And so the way they rib each other is also different. They will make fun of Ham being philosophical or Kel being cheerful and self-aggrandizing.

Oren: A little bit of a try-hard.

Bunny: Or Breeze being stuffy.

Chris: Does any character, like, constantly teased for not having notes?

Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: Actually, there’s a character who’s teased for having too many notes. Not that you’d know anything about that.

Oren: Boom. Ooh, oof.

Chris: [Laughs]

Bunny: [Chuckles] And that character is Dockson, whose name I remember because the characters are distinct.

Chris: I hate them already.

Bunny, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: It’s interesting because Sanderson is not an author who I would typically think of when I think of authors with good prose. His prose is generally okay. But I do think his characters are pretty distinct. And I even felt that way about Way of Kings, which was a book that I was extremely bored with for 300,000 words. But the characters stood out. I remember most of the characters. They were fairly distinct. I even remember a decent number of the large number of people on Kaladin’s bridge crew. So, I’ll give Sando credit for that one.

Bunny: And I think it also helps in Mistborn, in terms of differentiating people’s personalities, that they also each have a role to play. But in Kaiju Preservation Society, they’re scientists. And they’re scientists who do different science while all being redditors. So there’s extra fewer things to differentiate them. And they all seem to go on similar missions and stuff too. I don’t know. It’s like if the characters in All Systems Red started bantering.

Oren: Oh gosh.

Bunny: I’d be like, “I dunno who any of you are.”

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Don’t threaten us with that, Bunny.

Bunny: [Laughs]

Chris: Again, another reason for banter is to build up the relationship and when I did a critique of Crescent City, for instance, and we establish the main character Bryce has a best friend named Danika. They have some banter that is there to establish how good friends they are. And it’s clear the beginning of that book is really invested in their friendship.

But I think when you have too many characters or your characters are not distinct, it doesn’t reveal anything about them. And it also doesn’t build up their relationship because you can’t remember, “Okay, so which two people is this banter happening between?” Nothing feels special anymore, which is the whole point, is to distinguish it as a special relationship.

Bunny: Exactly. And then I think another important part is something we also touched on, which is that it needs to be offset by serious moments. Serious moments need to have the weight that they deserve. And in Mistborn, this isn’t hard because everything is serious.

Oren: They’re very dark.

Bunny: Everything aside from these banter moments. It’s quite a dark book. But in Kaiju Preservation Society, there are moments that should be serious. The villain has captured them, but let’s make an Incredibles reference.

Oren: Well, Incredibles, pretty good movie. [Chuckles]

Bunny: It is a good movie, but I’m trying to get invested in the fact that they might die.

Oren: They’re not gonna, though. We know. It’s fine.

Bunny: Yeah, they’re not gonna, it’ll be fine.

Oren: I wouldn’t worry about it.

Chris: There is a place for good comedies like Galaxy Quest for instance. Well, I’m thinking about Galaxy Quest and even their tenser moments, they make jokes. Jokes about how the captain managed to get his shirt off. Or when they go through the part of the ship that has stomping, clanky things for no reason, that they have to get through. And that’s because it’s very much a comedy. And it’s very devoted to comedy, even in its tenser moments.

Bunny: It sounds like there’s also different kinds of jokes there too. There’s physical comedy for instance.

Chris: I would say there’s different kinds of jokes. But honestly, I think if we compared it to Marvel, we might find it’s a lot of… Because the whole point of Galaxy Quest–

But at the time it was novel. That’s the thing. At the time it was pretty unique.

–But the whole point of it is being a self-aware thing, because not only is it modeled after Star Trek, but the whole premise of that story is people from a television show that is basically Star Trek. Their actors coming back, and some alien race thought it was real, and like documentaries, and actually made the ship for them. And so now they have to pretend to be the people they were acting, the characters they were acting out. And for that reason it’s just naturally really irreverent and self-referencing and silly. Kind of the same way Marvel is, but it has a very strong reason.

But it also has silly things like the cute aliens that turn out to have tons of teeth. They’re like, “Oh, they’re so cute. Oh no! They’re evil.” And they start attacking. That has nothing to do with the premise. That’s just a funny joke that takes something tense, but also makes it funny. And it’s not that we can’t do those stories. I do think that you wanna manage tension in any story, including a comedy. So there may be a point at which, “Okay, that’s too many jokes. We’re not getting enough tension.” I definitely do think there’s something to be said about Oren’s theory that really the base problem here is that we’re just all tired of the MCU.

Bunny: [Chuckles] If there be one takeaway from this episode…

Chris: [Laughs] It’s that we’re tired of the MCU.

Oren: One question that I am very curious about is, I’m trying to figure out if the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has good banter? Or if it just feels like the banter is good because I’m hearing voice actors give it in real time and it feels very immersive. Would this banter be good if I was reading it on a page? I don’t know. I was thinking of stories with good banter and I immediately thought of Baldur’s Gate 3, but then I was like, “I dunno if I can remember any of the banter.” I just remember liking that my characters were doing it as we were exploring the swamp.

Chris: Well, delivery definitely makes a difference.

Bunny: To be fair, a lot of my banter with my friends might also sound pretty lame if someone recorded it. Which is why I have a podcast.

Oren: Hey guys, we’re gonna all meet up and have an offline podcast with no recordings.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: You know, a lot of people read the transcript of this podcast instead of listening to it.

Oren: They do.

Chris: So they read all of our jokes without our tone of voice.

Oren: Does that make them better or worse? We may never know. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Unmasked, I feel unmasked.

Oren: Well, now that we’ve all been unmasked for being terribly unfunny, I think this will be a good time to end the episode. That is what it says in my show notes.

Bunny: [Chuckles] Which you have.

Oren: Which I have.

Bunny: Mine also say that. It’s nice to have notes that say that.

Chris: I was gonna invite listeners to visit us on Patreon, but since it’s not in my notes, I think maybe I just can’t.

Oren: We just can’t do it. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

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